THE SEXUAL PREDATOR STORM

      The hurricane of accusations against famous men, including some much-admired figures from entertainment and politics, gives the impression that most men are hiding histories of molestation, harassment, pedophilia, or even rape. The effect this windstorm is to paint the majority of  men as brutal and bestial. I have lived for 78 years and I have never known a friend or acquaintance whom I would suspect of any such behavior.

Let us start with my father. Perhaps he was better than most men, but he was the first man I ever knew and he was as humane and decent a man as this world produces. I have tried throughout my life to pattern myself after my father, but he was too kind, loving, honest, and faithful a man to copy. I have three brothers, and each of them, in his own way, has modeled his life after my father. It is beyond human credibility to imagine that any of them would ever be a sexual predator.

Over the decades of my life as an attorney I have made many friends drawn from the law firms and professional ranks of New York, Connecticut, and Ohio. Sure I have heard locker-room talk, but never the kind admitted to by Donald Trump on Access Hollywood. No friend or acquaintance I have ever known has bragged of non-consensual sex with a woman, especially someone underage. I have never heard a friend or acquaintance speak of sexual interest in someone underage. The only such confessions I have ever heard have been by criminal defendants.

I feel a great deal of respect and admiration for those brave women who have come forward to expose the male predators who apply their power to debase and humiliate innocent female victims. Those predatory entertainers should all be fired and the politicians should resign or be impeached. Many of such men should go to jail.

It is a matter of concern, however, that some men are caught-up in the whirlwind for the most minor offenses. I am thinking particularly of former president George H.W. Bush. The minor pats, in front of his wife, by an old man in a wheelchair, should not be the cause of an outcry. His distinctive leadership of this country should earn him a little slack.

 I go back to the life of my late beloved father. He once phoned me at the office, and while talking to the receptionist he called her “Dear.” She rebuked him for using that term and told this good and gentle old man that he was a “male chauvinist pig.” My father was not used to being spoken to in this manner and was quite shaken by it. He apologized to the receptionist. The next time I saw him he was in tears speaking of the rebuke. He was not a man of the modern world, and did not understand that there were new rules of discourse. Even now that I am an old man, my heart is heavy thinking about that incident.

I feel it is important that we remember that not all men are pigs. Most men, as they struggle through this harsh world, try to behave decently. We must be careful not to let good honest men like George H.W. Bush and my father be swept-up in this tempest of accusation.

TRUMP AND CLASS

I can usually tell a Trump supporter just by looking at him. This is especially true of men. Support for and opposition to Donald Trump is based largely on social class, and social class today is based almost entirely on education. I watched a discussion on television the other day in which several Trump supporters and several Trump opponents participated. I was able to spot the trump supporters right away. They were physically heavier than the opponents, had shorter hair, and redder faces. When introduced, they all had occupations as blue collar workers. The Trump opponents were thinner, better dressed, and better educated.

The election of Donald Trump revealed that the divisions in America are primarily based on social class and education. This is nothing new. I watched the Ken Burns documentary The Vietnam War on television and the split between social classes was apparent at the time of that war. While students at many universities were demonstrating against the Vietnam War, blue collar workers were demonstrating in support of the war. I remember well that when students at Pace University in New York demonstrated against the war, construction workers on a nearby project became enraged and violently attacked the students.

There has always been an antagonism between the educated classes and the (so-called) working classes. This was manifested in historical revolutions such as the French Revolution. The deep hatred the common people (“sans-culottes”) held against the nobility was not so much based on wealth, but rather, on social status, manners, spoken language, clothing (the sans-culottes did not wear the culottes worn by noblemen), and education. The nobles disdained the sans-culottes, and they manifested that disdain in every encounter. Similarly, the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution hated the noble class primarily because of status and education and not because of wealth.

How can I say that? Isn’t wealth the real cause of resentment between the classes? Well, look at the beliefs and feelings of Trump supporters. Why do so many blue collar people identify with Donald Trump? He is a very wealthy man, possibly a billionaire. If it was wealth that they hated they would certainly not support the Donald. No, it is something else. Despite the fact that he has had a good education, Trump comes across as an uneducated man. He speaks in rough sentences with a very small vocabulary and a New York accent. He is probably not very self-educated. One gets the feeling that he does not read books and is unfamiliar with history, philosophy, literature, political theory, and other academic pursuits.

Many college graduates continue to learn after graduating. Many become autodidacts (self-educated), reading books, attending classical music concerts, and going to art museums. Trump gives evidence that he never does any of these things. One remembers the high style of John and Jackie Kennedy, with philosophers, intellectuals, and classical musicians in attendance at the White House. It is very doubtful that you will see any of that under Trump.

Like Trump, there are many college graduates who do not appear to be very educated. I have known a number of them. They went to college to get degrees in business, and avoided the more liberal arts subjects. One can hardly blame them. The business world is not crying out for art historians. Many of those ill-educated graduates became Trump supporters. You go into the houses of these people and there are no book cases and no books.

On the other hand there are many people who never went to college, or never attended for very long, who are extremely well-educated. One occasionally sees them on the TV show, Jeopardy. Do you remember Frank Spangenberg? They may never have had the money to go to college, or they may not have attended for other reasons, but they have always had a deep love of learning. They may have taken advantage of free libraries to become well educated, and may have spent their sparse earnings going to concerts or operas. They are more likely to be Trump opponents.

In the last election Hillary Clinton appeared to be the consummate intellectual. She showed scorn for Donald Trump. She picked a man for Vice President with blue-collar credentials to counter-balance the ticket. The blue collar voters hated her. Those voters vastly outnumbered the educated voters supporting Hillary Clinton. If it were not for the Black, Hispanic, and other minority voters, she wouldn’t have won the popular vote.

It is hard to calculate how deep the anger of working-class Americans is for the educated class. One hopes it goes no deeper than voting for someone like Donald Trump. There are Neo-Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, and other extreme right-wingers out there, and it is not impossible to imagine one of them trying for the White House. Just remember 1930s Germany.

EVIL

          I strongly disliked Donald Trump long before he ran for President. I always thought he was an arrogant blowhard, even back in the days when he gained fame for repairing the Wollman Skating Rink in New York. When Trump aired his “birther” beliefs, that Obama was not born in America, George F. Wills, to my delight, called him a “Bloviating Ignoramus.” When Trump declared for the presidency, I assumed he had zero chance. I believed that the American people thought of Trump as a publicity-seeking clown, and when asked what I thought of him as a candidate, I said that he was a joke.

            Like most intelligent persons, I was totally stunned when Trump won the election. I didn’t realize that there were so many uneducated, disaffected, stupid people in America. I didn’t know what to think of Trump. In my mind he was still a joke, and it was going to be a strange four years with this clown as Commander in Chief. I couldn’t imagine what kind of cabinet he would appoint or how he intended to carry-out his promise to “Make America great again.” I doubted he would greatly improve the economy, create jobs, defeat ISIS, halt illegal immigration, build his stupid wall, or repair the infrastructure of the country.

            With the exception of Steve Bannon, I was not particularly alarmed at the people he appointed to his cabinet. I should have seen Bannon as a red flag. From what I read, Bannon was a racist and alt-right-winger. But I did not look deeply into it. Some of Trump’s appointments bothered me, but I assumed that that was what you would expect of a conservative. I was not alarmed until the Charlottesville riots.

            The riots in themselves were not what alarmed me the most. I knew that those hate groups were out there and that they occasionally demonstrated, carrying automatic weapons, wearing swastika tattoos, and waving Confederate flags. I knew that their demonstrations would bring-out counter-demonstrations. What alarmed me were Trump’s statements about the riots. To him, there was wrong “on many sides.” He said that there were “fine people” on both sides. This balancing of denunciation was not just the stupidity of an incompetent chief executive. This was a statement of support for those low-life people who admire Adolph Hitler and the evil he perpetrated.

            I know that it is common for people of a political persuasion to accuse their opponents of evil, and I do not do it easily. You do not call your opponents evil for tax increases or cuts, military or domestic spending, welfare reform, or most social issues. Rather than accuse Trump and his henchmen of evil, I would prefer to accuse them of ignorance, malefaction, and mendacity. But here there is something much more serious. Here there is evil.

            I have spent my life studying the Nazis. I have found myself stunned and occasionally in tears reading about the Holocaust. I have found myself baffled by the horror of a so-called civilized nation setting out to imprison, starve, torture, murder, gas, and burn an entire race of innocent people. And yet, to my disgust, I have seen the mindset of those Nazi murderers copied and admired by some modern American people.

            I have examined the kind of people who were Nazis in World War II Germany. The major enforcers of Nazi horror, the Gestapo and the SS, were thugs and losers without education or societal respect. The anti-Semitic conservative masses went along with the Nazis. Hitler and his thugs started-out small, but gradually grew into a dangerous power.

When you look at the American hate groups you see the same kind of unrefined, crude, angry, bitter, ugly, stupid, uneducated thugs that supported Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s. I guess there are many such people all over the world. Educated, intelligent people have to work to prevent these thugs from gaining power. It will be much harder when you have someone like Trump in power. As I look at the Neo-Nazis, KKK, and White Supremacists today I see an evil that could grow into real political power if supported by people in high office.

RESPECT AND TRUMP

            When Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were president, liberal Democrats opposed them with anger and vitriol. But there never was the kind of scorn leveled against them that we now see with Donald Trump. The difference, I believe, is respect. Past Republican presidents, like Richard Nixon, came in for heated opposition from Democrats, but there was always a certain underlying respect for the office of President that even the most avid liberals felt for them. Now, all over America, in streets and in the media, one sees demonstrations with banners claiming that Trump is “Not my president.” Millions of people not only oppose Trump, they refuse to acknowledge his victory in the presidential election. They refuse to respect him. I do not remember ever seeing such opposition to a president. This is what I call “Virtual Impeachment.”

            It is not just that Trump’s approval ratings are dismally low. Other presidents have experienced very low approval ratings. But after six months, Trump’s ratings should be an embarrassment to him. His current approval rating, according to Gallup, is 34%. Other polling firms have found similarly dismal figures for Trump. The weighted average from data-centric website FiveThirtyEight—a tracker that aggregates surveys and adjusts for quality, recency, sample size and partisan lean—pegged his approval at just 37.2 percent Friday, August 25, 2017. That's just 0.6 percentage points higher than his all-time low in the tracker. Trump's disapproval, meanwhile, stood at 56.8 percent Friday, according to FiveThirtyEight. According to FiveThirtyEight's tracker, no president in the history of modern polling has had an approval rating so poor at this point in his tenure, 

            Late-night comedians have always made a living by joking about incumbent presidents. Saturday Night Live has performed some brilliant skits lampooning Jerry Ford, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and even Barack Obama. But never in living memory have the spoofs and parodies carried such scorn as they do now with President Trump. Watch the first fifteen minutes of Seth Meyers each night and you get a hilarious take-down of President Trump and his colleagues. But it is not just Seth Meyers doing the ridicule. Watch Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Trevor Noah, and James Corden, and you will get a level of derision and disrespect not seen with any other modern president.

            Trump hotly denounces the News Media. He claims that they are producing “Fake News.” The problem is that not all in the News Media are liberals. It is surprising to pick-up the paper in the morning and find Trump being criticized by Republican columnists. People like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, and Mona Charen, who are reliable conservative columnists, have been loudly criticizing Trump and his administration. Television news shows tend to highlight Trump’s many blunders, correcting his frequent misstatements and fabrications. Internet sites such as Facebook seem totally obsessed with attacks on Trump. If it were not for his blatant braggadocio, hyperbole, and mendacity, I would feel sorry for him.

            With so many people feeling that Donald Trump is not their president, it is a kind of Virtual Impeachment. Trump is experiencing a huge, tragic, lack of respect

SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH INSURANCE SYSTEM

           

With the President and most Republicans in Congress calling for repeal of Obamacare, and Republicans not able to get consensus on a new plan, we should consider the options that could easily solve our healthcare problems.

Canada and most of the countries of Europe have single-payer health insurance systems. I’m sure they are perplexed by our pretensions of being the world’s leading nation when we don’t even have a modern health insurance system. Under a single-payer system the American Government could provide health insurance for all citizens just as it does now for those on Medicare. It would also cover dental, eye, and psychiatric care.

There is another possibility. With the “Public Option,” a single-payer system would allow people who are not eligible for Medicare to purchase Medicare insurance from the government for prices far lower than they would pay under the current system. Although there was a strong effort made in Congress to include a “Public Option” when the ACA (Obamacare) was enacted, that effort was defeated by senators like Joe Lieberman from Connecticut--the insurance capital of America.

The main reason we do not have single-payer system is not that the public opposes such a change. Many polls show that Americans would prefer a universal health insurance program comparable to the system in Canada over the current system. Some 58 percent of respondents in a Gallup Poll support replacing ObamaCare with a universal healthcare system.

Nor is the reason we do not have a single-payer system that such a system would be more expensive for taxpayers and the government than the kind of private insurance system we have now. A single-payer system would actually save billions of dollars in health insurance costs. Private insurance companies in the U.S. spend about $400 billion a year on administrative costs. Under a single-payer system, in which Medicare takes-over payment of all healthcare costs, virtually all of those administrative costs would be swallowed by the Medicare department of the government. The government would simply provide Medicare for everybody, not just seniors.

 Medicare for everybody would also save billions of dollars for taxpayers. It would cost individuals only an extra 2 percent in taxes, or around $1,200 per year for someone earning $60,000 a year. That’s substantially less than most people currently have to pay for health insurance under the ACA.

The reason we do not have single-payer system is not that the quality of healthcare under a single-payer system would suffer. The truth is that our current healthcare system is very far from the best in the world. The countries with single-payer systems are doing far better than we are. The World Health Organization ranks the United States healthcare system 37^th in the World, behind Canada and all of the single-payer health care countries in Europe (We did beat-out Slovenia and Brunei).

The main reason why we do not have a single-payer system is that such a system would reduce the revenue of private insurance companies, and those companies have used their enormous power and wealth to strong-arm Republican and conservative Democratic legislators into blocking it.

A single-payer system would not put all health insurance companies out of business. They would be able to go on providing several types of health insurance, including the kind that we call “Medigap,” which is used by seniors today to pay for costs not covered by Medicare. They would also still be able go on selling Life, Property, and many other kinds of insurance.

           Right-wing demagogues will argue that a single-payer program is “socialized medicine.” That is mendacious nonsense. The same people argue that Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare are socialized medicine. A single-payer system would not do away with private doctors. Under a single-payer system, people would be able to choose their own doctors, specialists, clinics, and hospitals.

Do we want to save lives and make it possible for everybody to have quality healthcare under an inexpensive system, or do we want to preserve the profits and privileges of the private insurance industry?

VIRTUAL IMPEACHMENT

There are a lot of anti-Trump demonstrators out there carrying signs saying “Not My President.” They are so disturbed that this ignorant bully got elected that they refuse to recognize him as President of the United States. I think they have something there. Call it “Virtual Impeachment.” It now seems unlikely that the Congress will impeach the Donald despite his many moments of vulgarity, stupidity, and simple-minded tweeting. But a majority of Americans voted against him, and it is possible for them to show their rejection by means of virtual impeachment.

There are many powers, rights, and responsibilities built into the laws governing the Presidency. But there are no laws or regulations saying that we have to accept him as president in our hearts. We have to obey all the laws governing the presidency, but we do not have to refer to him as 'President.' We are not required to show him the respect ordinarily due a president or play “Hail to the Chief” when he appears.

We certainly are not required to equate him with his predecessor, who displayed all of the class and leadership lacking in the current inhabitant of the White House. We are not required to turn-out for his rallies and gatherings. I would suggest that people who oppose him as I do should turn our backs and shun him whenever and wherever he appears.

Most presidents recognize that they were elected by fewer than a unanimous public, so after being elected they try to unify the country behind them. Not this jerk. If anything, he has attempted to antagonize the majority of Americans who voted against him. Reza Aslan, a scholarly writer on religion and a commentator on CNN, recently said of Donald Trump’s response to the London terrorist attacks: “This piece of s*** is not just an embarrassment to America and a stain on the presidency. He's an embarrassment to humankind.”

If all of the people who voted against Trump and all of the people who have become disillusioned by his behavior since the election ignore him and show no respect for him it will be as if he was impeached and thrown out of office. It will be Virtual Impeachment.

EASTER AND HUMAN SACRIFICE

         Today we celebrate the return of Jesus from a death ordered by God as a human sacrifice.
The holiday was named “Easter” after Eostre, the Saxon goddess whose feast was celebrated at the Spring equinox.
        Ancient people would not be surprised at our celebration of the resurrection of a living god at this time of year. The death and resurrection of gods was a well known scenario in ancient myth. The death and resurrection of the Roman god Attis was celebrated on March 25th. Attis was the son of Cyble, known as “The Great Mother,” whose worship was introduced into Rome from the Phrygia (in today’s Turkey) around 204 BC.
         The Greek god Dionysus was killed by his enemies and died. He descended into Hades and arose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of Zeus.  His festival was celebrated in the Spring around the time that we now celebrate Easter. Other gods and goddesses who died and arose again from the dead are Adonis, Mithras, Persephone, Semele, Heracles (or Herakles), Osirus, Tammuz, Ishtar, and Melqart.
Christians today believe that Jesus was the omnipotent and everlasting god who created the universe. The Catholic Church and others believe that as the “Son of God,” Jesus is a manifestation of God himself through the Holy Trinity. The idea of a holy trinity did not originate with the Christians. Hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, the Egyptian goddess Isis was worshiped along with her consort, Sarapis, and their child Harpocrates (Horus), as members of a Holy Trinity.
The central belief of Christianity is that Jesus was a human sacrifice for mankind. Somehow, Christians have accepted this teaching from an ancient, barbaric time, and still believe it today. They believe that Man committed something called “Original Sin” and that the only way he could achieve salvation from original and other sins was by means of a human sacrifice. They believe that the almighty and eternal God, who is a merciful, loving, and forgiving God, could be appeased only by this hideous and grisly torture and lynching of a human being. Because an ordinary human sacrifice would not be sufficient, the Son of God had to come down to Earth to be the sacrificial victim. He had to be scourged, driven to Golgatha under the weight of the cross, nailed to the cross, pierced with a spear, and slowly suffocated hanging in great pain on the cross until he bled to death. Crucifixion was one of the most horrible forms of execution ever devised.
Human sacrifice was an integral part of much early worship of the gods. Today many religions still use an altar, but the first altars were used to sacrifice human and animal victims. References in literature to the sacrifice of human individuals harks back to the days when this was a routine and deeply reverent practice. In the story of the Trojan War, Agamemnon tells his wife to prepare his daughter for her marriage. He then takes her to the shore and sacrifices her to the gods in order to obtain favorable winds for his trip to Troy. You can be sure that the story is not pure whimsy. Human sacrifice was well known in ancient Greece, as it was in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Canaan, and Israel. At the time of Jesus, human sacrifice was a recent memory.
       It is clear that back in the early history of the Israelites, human sacrifice was customary. Consider the stories of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22:1-19,  Japhthah and his daughter in Judges 11:30-31, King Ahaz and his son in 2 Chronicles 28:3, and King Manasseh and his son in 2 Chronicles 33:6. Later in their history, the Israelites turned away from human sacrifice and declared it an abomination.
Nevertheless, the New Testament repeatedly refers to the idea that Jesus was a sacrifice for Mankind. For example, John 1:29, “Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the World;” John 2:2, “He is propitiation for the sins of the world;” Matthew 20, “Á ransom for many;” Matthew 26:28, “This is my blood of the New Testament which is shed for many for the remission of sins;” Hebrews 9:23-28, “Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many;” (See also Philippians 2:17, 4:18; Romans 12:1, 15:16; 1Peter 1:18-19, 2:5; Ephesians 1:7; and Titus 2:14).
The dogma that Jesus was crucified as a form of atonement for Man’s sins did not become established as a doctrine of the very early Church until the fourth century AD. Saint Augustine (354-430), who laid down many of the Church doctrines, including the doctrine of atonement, said that man was doomed to Hell until Jesus redeemed him. He regarded Jesus’ sacrifice “Not as payment of a debt due to God, but as an act of justice to the Devil in discharge of his fair and lawful claims.”
Like many other aspects of Christianity, the idea of propitiating god with a human sacrifice, and even having the god himself be the sacrificial victim, was not new when the Church dreamed up this explanation of Jesus’ crucifixion. It was borrowed from old pagan myths. I have mentioned the human sacrifices carried out by early Israelites. The Canaanites sacrificed to the gods, and the prophets inveighed against the sacrificing of Canaanite children to Moloch (See Samuel 17:17; Jeremiah 7:31; Ezekiel 16:20, 20:26).
In Egypt, the priests performed human sacrifice when the Pharaoh died. The Pharaoh was believed to be a god. His family and servants were buried alive with him. Eventually the priests started substituting animals, dolls and other forms of art for living victims. In ancient Mesopotamia archiologists have found the tombs of kings with entire households that were buried alive when the king was interred.
In India, it was the custom to perform human sacrifice in order to guarantee a good harvest and appease the gods. The victim was believed to be the god sacrificing himself, in the form of a man, to himself as a god. The ancient Khonds of India believed that their sacrificial victim died for all mankind and became a god.
The ancient Greeks sacrificed a criminal at Rhodes after putting him in royal robes. They did this in memory of the sacrifice by Kronos of his “Only begotten Son.” Themistocles sacrificed Persian youths to Dionysus.

HOW I FEEL

HOW I FEEL

            I’m not mad at Donald Trump. I’m not mad at the people who voted him into office. This should not, however, comfort them. What I feel toward them is not anger, it is something else. I feel sorry for them. That is because I understand what motivated them to vote this stupid, racist, sexist, jerk into office. For the most part it was class hatred. They felt that the idiot Trump spoke for them, the common people, and that Hillary Clinton spoke for the elite, the educated people. For most of the Trump voters, it was his opening remarks that got them on his side. He declared that the undocumented Hispanic immigrants were rapists and criminals. That appealed to his supporters’ xenophobia, bigotry, and ignorance. The trouble is, he does not speak for them and they will probably feel down the road that he is their worst enemy.

            Most white people are prejudiced against Black people to one degree or another. They will deny it because they do not believe that they are bigoted. They will point-out that they have friends who are black and that they get along well with African Americans. But the simple fact is that no matter what they say, they are prejudiced against Blacks, and often, despite having Black friends, they have strong feelings against Blacks. They are not a small group like the KKK, but they include probably 99% of the people who voted for Donald Trump. I know many such people. They would be offended if you said that they were bigoted. But if you listen to their conversation you will hear them express anti-Black feelings. Most of them are also bigoted against Hispanic people.

            I understand how those people felt when Barack Obama was elected President. They had always assumed that because Blacks were so inferior to White people a Black person would never be elected President. When he was elected, they were shocked. They felt that they had not been paying attention and that as a result a member of the hated and despised Black race got into the White House. In a sense, that is how we liberals felt about the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. We never imagined that he could win. He comes across as a dumb bigot. But that is exactly what his supporters like about him. He will go on making outrageous statements, doing outrageous things, and instead of his followers being offended by him they will love it all. They hated political correctness of every kind and when they heard about some of the rules and restrictions on campuses, they were furious. Trump made them feel that they would be able to say whatever they wanted and to behave toward minority people the way they wanted.

            In his first few weeks in office Trump has done nothing to ease the aversion better educated people feel toward him. One thing that is beginning to stand out is hat he is emotionally lacking in confidence. His show of machismo reveals not self confidence, but rather, insecurity. It is hard to imagine any of his predecessors arguing about the size of the crowd at his inauguration. The problem is, how will this failure of confidence affect his administration? As a reader of history I have noted that many leaders who felt insecure in their position used attacks on perceived enemies as a means of distracting the public from their fears. Could this apprehensiveness of Donald Trump lead us into a nuclear war?

            Apparently, Trump supporters do not notice his obvious failings. They like what he has done so far. A reader of history will note that common people often love the leaders who lead them into disaster. The people who supported Trump are like the ordinary people of Germany who hailed Hitler all the way to the total destruction of the Third Reich. It was not the educated, sophisticated elite who supported Hitler. It was the ignorant common people, the mindless type who always admire the tyrants who lead them into Hell.